Universtorage

A Student Summer Storage Marketplace

Max Jiazhou Li , Rachel Hong , Nicole Schreiber
2021-05-06

Problem Statement

Place a short description (3 sentences max) of your problem.

Because of the constantly changing living situation, college students often find themselves in a summer situation where they have no places to store their belongings. The services offered by the existing storage companies can be very expensive and inefficient, since there could only be a limited number of pickup or drop off dates, and at the same time we thought that many upperclassmen who are going back home or going away for summer internships have extra spaces in their apartments or houses.

This is important because every year we have been at Penn, we have seen people struggle to find summer storage with no tangible solution. We think it is worth solving because it would fix an inefficiency in student summer storage by providing a platform for the supply and demand to meet and optimize their storage needs.

User Personas

Persona 1, Noah

Persona 2, Emma

Persona 3, Michelle

Conversation Starters

  1. Where have you lived during your four years at Penn?
  2. How did you store your belongings over the summer(s)?
  3. How do you feel about the summer storage options available in University City?
  4. Would you be willing to pay money to store your items somewhere, and if so how much?
  5. Do you have any concerns about how you stored your items over the summers?

User Interviews

Interview 1, Sneha Sharma

Interview 2, Matthew Han

Interview 3, Sylvia Chen

Learnings from the User Interviews

Learning 1

We should market our product towards freshmen who do not yet have close relationships with upperclassmen who live off campus. Therefore we should focus our marketing efforts near freshman housing like the Quad, the freshman Facebook group and groupme chat, and to different listservs.

Learning 2

There are many different preferences that people have for summer storage such as location, transaction method, housing conditions, etc. Therefore we will have a filter feature and a checklist of features available on the postings so that people can find the posting that best fits their needs.

Learning 3

People are willing to pay different prices for different services and quality of storage space. Therefore, our pricing system allows the poster to determine their own price and we offer a guide of average storage prices in the area so that they can keep their own prices under that standard. In addition, we allow posters to offer transportation assistance for additional money.

Storyboarding a Solution

Frame 1, User Situations

Frame 2, Kevin and Sam connects through Universtorage

Frame 3, Dropping off and Picking up

Next Steps